We're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that.
What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.
Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).
The law can and should make a few things better:
- introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements)
- ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls
I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the problem is that these parental controls don't work. It's a matter of incentive: at the moment, it's in the interest of providers to help subvert the filters. Device makers also don't have the strongest incentives to make the filters great, since that would presumably lead to less engagement from large market segments.
One of the explicit goals of age verification laws is to throw the legal responsibility of preventing access from minors onto the providers, thereby inverting the incentives.
What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.
Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).
The law can and should make a few things better: - introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements) - ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls
I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.